Also, the Teancum analogy only really works if there are two armies and one general assassinates one on the other side. In this debate, there seems to be POMO (Pissed Off Mormons Online), vs . . . Beck. Alone, she’s not much of a camp to sneak into. And in a debate, even an assassinated opponent comes back. Kind of like sneaking into a lonely tent at night, but all you can do is throw a bucket of paint. Just wait for the next day and use a roller. That way you won’t get any on yourself. That’s what the above-mentioned Sunstone review did. I thought it fair, well researched, well thought out, and very honest (it mirrored almost exactly my own reading, and research, of the book, minus the interviews of course). The review was leagues more scholarly than its subject, which is ultimately such a better weapon to hit Beck with than mere vitriol, if you want her to stay down.

Yours is a losing argument, Jordan. Title VII does not easily and obviously yield the terms “hostile environment” in connection to current sexual harrasment standards. At any rate, it’s not easy or obvious enough that any judge saw it before the late 1970s. And the intervening 15 or so years between the act’s passage and the first decision applying it to sexual harrasment was a period of unprecedented activism–it yielded such judicial monstrosities the “fundamental right” to abortion (the only fundamental right which has never had more than a bare majority of support among those to whom it supposedly applies) and school bussing. If it took these judges so long to extrapolate something close to the current reading, you can’t very well claim that it’s obvious or easy.

Nevertheless, I’d like to see exactly what portion of Section 703 you take to easily and obviously yield the terms “hostile work environment” and how this can be understood to obviously and easily include sexually suggestive meterials or common slang. The most it can reasonably be taken to say is that you can’t pressure workers to quit by mistreating them–a far cry from the current standard.

You don’t have to be a legal genius to see that. Or some hyper-active judge.

Thanks for the vote of confidence.

Jordan Fowles: [the doctrine of the hostile work environment] was not a doctrine created by the judiciary. It was created by Congress. It’s called Title VII.

I’ve read the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and I can’t find the term hostile work environment anywhere. The reason? It’s not in the Title VII, or any other part of the Civil Right Act of 1964. I realize many law school courses on laws do not use actual laws as the primary texts, and that few courses on the Constitution use the US Constitution as the primary text, but just the same, shouldn’t you know that the doctrine of the “hostile work environment” as we know it was created out of whole cloth from a section of law concerned primarilly with hiring practices and promotions? I stand by my assertion that it was created out of whole cloth by a crybaby courts to appease crybaby litigants.

I should know better than to bite, but this was not a doctrine created by the judiciary. It was created by Congress. It’s called Title VII.

Last I checked even conservative wingnuts thought it was OK for Congress to create law.

Seems to me you must either be bored or you proved his point quite adequately.

In truth, your anemic version of red-meat masculinity has almost no nutritional value, and commenters who know you quickly find somewhere else to eat.